Global Warming

The brutal winter of 2009 is finally coming to an end in the Great Plains. Or is it? Temperatures across North Dakota have been five to 10 degrees below normal all winter long. Massive snowfalls have blanketed the Peace Garden State for months. As… North Dakota endur[ed] an end-of-March blizzard.

The people of Fargo are paying the price. The ice-jammed Red River is cresting more than 40 feet over normal, flooding everything that isn’t protected by the heroic efforts of North Dakota citizens building up and maintaining the levies.

So, I ask you, what is the cause of all the cold, the snow, and the ice?

Global warming, of course!

According to Kate White, a civil engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “climate change caused by global warming likely is changing ice conditions and adding to the unpredictability” of ice jams along the Red River, so she said.

Let me see if I get this. A “near-record snowpack,” along with below-normal temperatures, have led to more ice, which is acting unpredictably because of global warming?

What am I not getting here? I’ll tell you what I am getting—more proof that apocalyptic visions of global warming are driven by a particular worldview. Forget the facts.

Even President Obama, at least to some degree, has bought into it. Here’s what he had to say: “I actually think the science around climate change is real. . . . If you look at the flooding that’s going on right now in North Dakota . . . that indicates the degree to which we have to take this seriously.”

Record snow is the result of global warming?

Folks, what we have to take seriously here is the fact that our worldview determines how we see the world and how we live in the world. And we’d better have it correct, which is why I spend so much time talking about this on this broadcast every day.

Despite the fact that the globe has been cooling since at least 2002, or that near-record cold and snow have plagued much of North America all year long, all the proponents of global warming can see is—well, global warming.

This is why its adherents in Congress and in the White House want curbs on greenhouse gases, potentially ruinous cap-and-trade policies, and curbs on oil exploration (at a time when we need to decrease our dependence on foreign oil). And if in the near future you start paying upwards of $5 a pound for ground beef, thank those in Congress who want to tax cow flatulence as a way to combat global warming.

As the New York Times relates, renowned physicist Freeman Dyson has called “climate change an ‘obsession’—the primary article of faith for ‘a worldwide secular religion’ known as environmentalism.” Dyson accuses the adherents of this religion of “relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee . . . imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth.”

But the models aren’t holding true. Which is why the global warming scientists need to examine their worldview.

And then they need to step out of the computer lab and take a walk. But they’d better bundle up first.

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In my 60-plus years on “this planet” I have seen a lot of environmental hoaxes–including the one of 30 years ago, or so, in which the national news magazines informed us in apocalyptic terms that we were on the edge of climate change disaster–a new ice age!

I have sort of gotten used to the crazies broadcasting their latest theories of gloom and doom, only to be corrected a year, or five years later. But the global warming craze has gotten completely out of hand, and is about to cost our economy in serious ways.

The Church, with our ‘preferential option for the poor’, should be opposing the madness, since economic stress lands disproportionately on the poor of the world. Instead what I see, including at the Vatican, is Church leaders on the global warming bandwagon, wagging fingers of moral outrage at the environmental sin of global warming.

This is reminiscent of the unfortunate Galileo affair. Then, as now, the Church prematurely chose the wrong side in a scientific debate which had not been resolved. The embarrassment this time will probably be less, but in principle the same thing is happening. Too bad we the Church seem not to have learned the lesson of history.

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